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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24063787">euphoria streams</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnlogan/pseuds/verulams'>verulams (finnlogan)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Borderlands (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe- Online Gaming, Gaming, M/M, Multi, Online Relationship, OnlyFans, Pegging, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Streamer AU, Threesome - F/M/M, Twitch - Freeform, Twitchcon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:53:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,920</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24063787</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnlogan/pseuds/verulams</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack 'HandsomeJack' Lawrence is a Twitch streamer with a loyal following and a rival in the form of Nisha 'TheLawbringer' Kadam. Rhys is a moderator, and together, they're gonna make some cash. Or they're gonna try, anyway.</p><p>Jack starts the Twitch channel to get rich quick, Rhys meets up with him to get rich quick, and it only seems right that they get the onlyfans account together, right?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Handsome Jack/Nisha/Rhys (Borderlands), Handsome Jack/Rhys (Borderlands)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>euphoria streams</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Welcome to euphoria steams, a fic for the modern era! I hope you find reading this as much fun as I found writing it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack starts to scream the moment Nisha shoots him live on stream. He yells and yells, and his microphone peaks into Rhys’ headphones. It’s all Rhys can do to unplug them as fast as he can and toss them to the side. Jack’s voice <em>explodes</em> out of the laptop, and Rhys holds back a little snort. Since his laptop speaker was shitty, tinny and old, Jack suddenly seems even <em>less</em> dignified than before. </p><p>His yelling is easier on the ears now that he’s unplugged, though. On the screen, Jack respawns. “Okay, okay,” he says, pretending that he isn’t breathing heavily and smoothing his hair back into place. He looks dishevelled, the little face cam in the bottom right of the screen revealing all. “We’re good now, pretend you didn’t see that. This is good, we’ve lulled them into a false sense of security. All we have to do is-”</p><p>Nisha promptly shoots him again, and the cycle begins anew. </p><p>“<em>Son of a gun!”</em> Jack howls and the chat explodes into a clamour of reacts and ‘F’s, and a significant amount of them just call him a scrub. Rhys sighs as the humour begins to wear off, and grabs his headphones back from the side of the desk.</p><p>Stretching, he feels his back crack and shoves the headphones back onto his head. Him watching Jack’s streams for hours at a time with his neck craned over his laptop was terrible for his spine. It wasn’t good for Jack, either, but everyone was good at ignoring Jack’s rising blood pressure and even better at laughing when he died in-game and started screeching. Rhys takes one look at the increasing amount of spam and turns the chat to subscribers only mode. It achieves little, but at least it shuts up the people that are spamming ‘scrub’. Rhys sits back in his chair and stares at Jack’s pixelated face. </p><p>***</p><p>When he explains the radical change in his life course that he has experienced recently, he finds it hard to point to the start of it all. It’s like scraping blunt fingernails over a roll of tape or trying to find a flat surface on a sphere. Regardless, he has to start somewhere, mainly because his old friends from real life start questioning him, so he may as well just pick a spot and go from there.</p><p>His old life was similar to his current one. In his former life, he’d lived with his friends, and then everyone had moved away, and he had, too. He didn’t have many friends in his new city,  but he did have access to the internet. He stayed in touch with all his old friends, but it was… distant. Really distant. And anyway, he’d been watching Jack’s streams on Twitch for a long time; it was just that he hadn’t been watching seriously. </p><p>The start, for Rhys, is when he starts <em>worrying</em> about HandsomeJack. He revises his thoughts; it wasn’t that he’d been watching Jack a long time, he’d been watching since day <em>one</em>. It was funny, really, because Rhys isn’t sure how he had managed to get an emotional attachment out of watching a Twitch streamer, but he’d managed it anyway. His streams were… not good, not really, but funny? Definitely. Jack was really only very passable at games, not really the major league gamer he considered himself to be. Since he’d entered into a rivalry with Nisha ’TheLawbringer’ Kadam, his streams had gotten even funnier. God knew exactly how that relationship had started originally. It was confusing to Rhys, how they’d met and how they’d decided to murder or grief on-site in every game they played together, but it had certainly happened.</p><p>The point was this: HandsomeJack was in a rivalry with TheLawbringer, who was in every sense a much better gamer than he was. It was a competition of sorts, really, but if that’s what it was then Jack was <em>losing.</em> It made for good entertainment, though, which was probably why they were doing so well in the stats recently. That was the most crucial part of all. Jack was doing well in the stats.</p><p>Rhys has a good nose for scams. Rhys has an excellent nose for scams, and from the moment he started moderating for Jack, from the <em>moment</em> that they began to talk off-stream, Rhys could tell. For Jack? This was a get rich quick scheme. </p><p>“Nah, c’mon boys, you know how it is,” Jack had, sipping at his energy drink. “I’m not saying I’ll quit streaming if I got rich, I’m just saying I’d quite streaming if I got a million-dollar donation. 2 milly dono? I’m switching off my face cam and getting surgery to look like whoever it is that donates. Hey,” he had interrupted himself, tilting his head, “Do you think Elon Musk watches me? Elon? Are you there, man? We’ve gotta talk business, Elon, I have some <em>big ideas</em>-“</p><p>Rhys had been amazed, because the only thing that comes out of that conversation is people begging for him to stay over text-to-speak donations, thereby giving him <em>more money.</em> Jack’s scheme was <em>working. </em>He wasn’t rich, not yet, but he would be.  There was never a doubt in Rhys’ mind that Jack was going to make it big, even as he hollers and screams at his computer for what feels like hours. The question wasn’t whether he would make it; Rhys has moderated for him for <em>years</em> and watched him for even longer. The problem was instead asking how <em>quickly</em> could do it. Jack’s running solidly at several thousand followers and a couple of million channel views, and Rhys gets the feeling something bigger was coming his way.</p><p>And hey, Rhys isn’t precious about it, and Rhys can smell a scam from a mile off. Rhys wants in. He wants in on the plan and in on the money, and he wants in on <em>Jack. </em>He tries not to think too hard about that last one, because really? Jack was going to win a game that everyone else didn’t even know they were <em>playing.</em> Rhys <em>wants in.</em></p><p>Rhys figures that he’ll have to defend his moral compass about the whole scam thing, later on, so he tries to repeat it in his head and make it clear: It hadn’t been a scam from the start. There was no grand plan where he’d decided to infiltrate Jack’s schemes and make himself a mod, but it does seem to look that way in hindsight. He’s… pretty happy with it, to be honest. He gets home at whatever time from his freelance programming to sift though nonsense and spam. However, he did also get back at whatever time to watch Jack, compelling and larger than life. Rhys is the first to admit he’s not the most aspiring streamer on the internet.</p><p>As if on cue, Rhys watches with trepidation as Jack teabags another player, cackling. He is almost instantly shot again by Nisha from across the map.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>God damn it, Nisha!” </em>Jack yells. A little note pops up the corner of the screen, a ‘gg jack’ from Nisha. Jack yells and hollers and screams, and the screen goes dark except for the small image of Jack in the corner, clutching his face in his hands.</p><p>Jack got mad. Jack got <em>really</em> mad, actually, so mad that Rhys is reasonably sure that his neighbours could hear him through the walls. Jack was loud. Jack <em>shouts.</em> He shouts and rages and trips over the most annoying thing in every game that he plays. He basically followed a three-step plan.</p><p>1.) Jack finds an annoying thing and tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him</p><p>2.) Jack cannot ignore the annoying thing.</p><p>3.) Jack screams at the game.</p><p>It’s an <em>act,</em> though, or Rhys is relatively sure it is, anyway. A person can only be so angry, and Jack was no exception. Jack streamed <em>full time.</em> Add to the equation that Jack did similar programming work to Rhys and that they’d <em>talked</em> to one another off-stream? He’d seemed flirty then, pet names and all. So, it was an act. </p><p>So, if Jack was putting on an act and scamming his several thousand followers somehow? He was smart. Smart and physically <em>big,</em> in the way a lot of streamers didn’t seem to be. Which only adds to his conclusion. Rhys wants <em>in.</em> He messages Jack first, something about a code for a random game that Rhys had (correctly) predicted would do well on stream. He doesn’t remember the name of the game, but he does remember the names that Jack calls him.</p><p>“Hey,” he’d written. “You’re CompanyMan, right? I’ve seen you in chat. What’s your name, pumpkin?”</p><p>Rhys had blinked and paused and stared at the screen. He’d taken a long breath. “I’m Rhys, Jack. Rhys Lynsey.”</p><p>Jack had made some joke about how he shouldn’t reveal his surname on the internet, because that shit made him liable to a dox, and would inevitably lead to the loss of his social security information.</p><p>The kicker is that Rhys can’t claim, not even for a second, that the reason it takes him so long to approach Jack is that he’s playing a long con. Rhys is not playing a long con. Rhys is just <em>nervous.</em> Jack was funny and big and bold, and probably unwilling to share his spoils of war. Rhys was trying to break into a vault, here, and in the end, it’s an external factor that makes him do it.</p><p>Nisha talks shit on Jack on her channel. But the way she does it… Rhys doesn’t know what’s going on between them, but whatever she says? Jack wakes up the next day with a 10% increase in subscribers.</p><p>It happens <em>overnight.</em> They enter some weird agreement where they talk shit on each other, and in the process gain some of the other’s viewers. Rhys has no idea how it works, but he’s happy that it does, because in the end? He gets mod by asking for it.</p><p>In the end, he gets a lot of things by asking for them.</p><p>*** </p><p>Jack finishes his mediocre and standard FPS game with a very sour ‘gg’ to Nisha, and then closes it.</p><p>“What should we play next? I’m not playing Tetris 99 again; I’m not a masochist. Oh! Yeah, wait, I have an excellent idea. I was playing a home game last night, doing some… Decorating.”</p><p>He opens Minecraft, and the chat ruptures into people who think this is the best possible outcome and people who think Jack is an idiot.</p><p>A donation gets read out by the machine as he opens the game.</p><p>“Idiot man who plays Minecraft,” says the computerised voice.</p><p>“Hey, hey!” Jack protests and loads his save file. “Come <em>on</em>, boys, I’m only one man! I’m a good one, but come on, my heart can only take so much. Guys, come on. Let daddy have a break.”</p><p>Rhys snickers under his breath at that. “<em>Daddy</em>,” he mutters and tries hard not to think about it.  He checks his bank account with his phone, watching with one eye as Jack tries valiantly to kill a zombie with a block of dirt. For once, he succeeds in not dying and blocks himself into a little hole in the ground.</p><p>Rhys’ bank account is looking bad. Not good. But… Rhys was in this for the long con. He had to play the long game.</p><p>Sighing, he opens up the donation box and types his message for $10. He… well, his bank account is not looking as healthy as it could be, so he has to remind himself that $10 was probably cheap for what he was going for. He needed to ask Jack to raise the threshold, actually, because people would still pay if they charged $15. Rhys can easily see the hoards of angry masses in Jack’s chat paying for the privilege of annoying him, that’s for sure.</p><p>Rhys blinks at the tinny voice when it reads his message. Never sounded good, and was chosen <em>because</em> of how tinny and weird it was, but it definitely seems more bizarre when it’s <em>his</em> words that it’s speaking.</p><p>“PO Box please Handsome Jack?” It says. “I want to send stuff, angry face.”</p><p>Jack splutters a laugh. “Oh, Rhys, I thought you’d never ask.”  Rhys laughs too when Jack raises his arched eyebrows and takes a drink of something from his bottle. He grins into the microphone. “Sure. What are you going to send me? Better not be butt stuff, CompanyMan, I know you’re into that.”</p><p>The chat roars, alive with people berating Rhys for his butt stuff, but the giggles escape from him anyway. He makes a mental note that Jack should probably be sent a HandsomeJack branded dildo at some point. It’d be funny, and besides, it was never wrong to near-violate Twitch’s terms of service. Maybe he could even get Jack to open it on stream if he tried hard enough. The ‘HandsomeJack Dildo Experience Livestream’ would do well as a clip, Rhys is confident. Also, it’d be hilarious.</p><p>Jack, on the other side of the screen, dies the moment he leaves the hole and sighs deeply.</p><p>“Hey,” he reasons, voice rough in Rhys’ headphones. “Guess what, though, boys. We get to respawn at the bed, where all the gear is. We’re fine! We’re <em>winning.”</em></p><p>Jack respawns in his house, as he’d predicted, and Rhys flexes his metal arm. He makes a face as the chat dives into a conversation about Jack being cursed by the ass gods for his crimes, apparently still focussed on butt stuff. They were rowdy today. To be honest, they were rowdy every day, but needs must. It’d be more convenient for Rhys if making money on the internet didn’t entail having a crass internet audience, but Rhys <em>often</em> didn’t get what he wanted. He gets to work and mutes a few people when they start being homophobic. Jack spends the next ten minutes ranting about butt stuff, wandering around the world, collecting materials.</p><p>Eventually, his character walks straight off a cliff.</p><p>***</p><p>Jack is not a relaxed man, and Rhys isn’t one either. They’re different in many ways, though, because when Jack reveals he’s not straight, he does it reasonably calmly. Rhys, on the other hand, feels several aspects of his world implode.</p><p>Rhys finds out when Jack, one day, announces that they’re going to be playing in his home Minecraft world. </p><p>“So, when we’re there, you’ve all gotta stay calm. We’ve got trade secrets going on in this one, boys, really high-security stuff.”</p><p>He spawns in the middle of a room. It’s made of stone and is lit up with torches to showcase the enormous Minecraft painting of a naked Hugh Jackman. </p><p>Rhys parts with another $10 of his money to ask Jack: “What are you <em>doing?</em>”</p><p>He grins a wide, cat-like grin, hopping up the side and adding gold blocks to the frame around Hugh Jackman’s nude body. “C’mon, CompanyMan! I’m just saying, if Huge Jackman asked me to raw him, I’d gladly take up that offer. I’m not going to turn down Hugh Jackman. You wouldn’t want me to turn him down, would you, pumpkin? That guy was <em>Wolverine! </em>You saw how jacked he was, right? He could be jacked again. He could <em>still</em> be jacked.”</p><p>The chat explodes into nonsense, so Rhys jams on subscribers-only mode and heaves a  deliberate breath.</p><p>Rhys’ gut response is to ask if Jack had a… partner. Which was petty unacceptable! Very unacceptable to want to be involved with a Twitch streamer. Especially when it was <em>Jack,</em> and <em>especially</em> when Jack called him <em>pumpkin.</em></p><p>Jack doesn’t wait for Rhys to respond and places the final block into the frame of his shrine for Hugh Jackman.</p><p>Rhys whacks himself in the head with his prosthetic. “Don’t be ridiculous, Rhys,” he mutters. “He’ll play an FPS against Nisha again, and you’ll remember how he is.”</p><p>Rhys has been dreaming, and he reminds himself that dreams weren’t really a solid basis for a relationship. See, Rhys has been having <em>Jack</em> dreams. Rhys has not only been having Jack dreams but Jack… sex dreams. Sometimes not even that, sometimes just <em>intimate</em> fantasies, and that couldn’t continue. It was<em> not possible</em> to go into business with someone he was fucking, absolutely <em>not,</em> and they weren’t even fucking! They’d never even met in real life!</p><p>Rhys dreams anyway.</p><p>***</p><p>Jack is sitting comfortably in his chair, fingers steepled and staring down at Rhys. It’s like he’s waiting for something.</p><p>Rhys opens and closes his mouth. “I’m not gonna do anything until you tell me so,” he huffs, knees painful on the cold, hard floor.  </p><p>A short pause breaks across his concentration, and Jack stares at him. “C’mere,” he says, and Rhys is there, wrenched forward by some unseen and unknown force. He whines as Jack’s widely slung legs shift, his jeans just a little tight. He moans again when Jack leans back, body loose and comfortable and the most powerful Rhys has ever seen him</p><p>“Do your worst,” he purrs, and Rhys wraps his arms around Jack’s leg and opens his mouth and-</p><p>Rhys wakes up from the dream. He mutters into the dark of his simple room. “Rhys, come on. You have to stop doing this.”</p><p>Rhys does not stop doing it.</p><p>***</p><p>The first parcel arrives, and Jack brings it on screen.</p><p>It’s a yellow mug with his logo on it, simple, clean lines. It also has a tiny dick on the base of it, only visible when it is tilted up to drink. </p><p>The chat roars with laughter. It only takes a second from Jack pouring his energy drink into it and taking a drink for the TTS to announce what was going on.</p><p>“What are you drinking? Winky face,” says the Australian text-to-speech man. </p><p>The chat unanimously reads: cum?</p><p>Jack stops dead, looks at the camera, scans the mug, and screeches. That highlight does well.</p><p>***</p><p>When the time (and funds) come for Rhys to send another parcel, this time he has a plan. He has the shirt custom made with Jack’s logo on it, made of an excellent material that is <em>not</em> cheap. He also buys three rolls of packing tape, and goes to town, wrapping it in as many layers as he can, before packing it in another slightly bigger box that it only <em>just</em> sealed.</p><p>Jack does an unboxing video again, and this time the viewership is higher.</p><p>“Hello, everybody!” He says, affecting a high-pitched and nasal voice. “Today I’m doing an unboxing video! We’ll be opening this, from our favourite moderator, Rhys CompanyMan! Everyone tell Rhys what a good guy he is, and also how much of a suck-up he is. We love that here; everybody should take a leaf from Rhys’ book.”</p><p>Rhys shuts off a couple of people making homophobic comments about them both, and pointedly ignores the comments that assumed that they were a couple. </p><p>Jack gleefully opens the first box, and Rhys <em>delights</em> as his face drops. Jack frowns and stares at the camera.</p><p>“Rhys, I know this was a challenge. It’s a dumb challenge,” he says, deadpan, and holds up the box with a full inch of tape wrapped around it. “However, I am not above dumb challenges. Let’s do this.”</p><p>Jack goes from perfectly reasonable to hurling the box at the floor in record speed, and when he’s done trying to pull it off with his bare hands, he scowls at the box. The tape is pulled in a million crisscrossing layers around it. </p><p>He starts trying to use his teeth. It had been a deliberate attempt to bait him. Rhys <em>knows</em> Jack is smart; he knows that Jack is aware of how many more views the videos where he loses his shit get. He <em>knows</em> Jack will rise to the bait.</p><p>It <em>works.</em> The TTS spills out recommendations of household objects other than knives and scissors that he could use to get into it, and the chat hurls insults at Rhys as he laughs.</p><p>’Man vs Box’ t gets the most views that Jack’s channel has ever had. They even upload it to Instagram and Twitter, even <em>YouTube,</em> where it is immediately demonetised.</p><p>It doesn’t matter that it’s demonetised, not really, because the damage is done, the spoils of won. Jack’s subscriber count ticks up <em>again.</em></p><p>***</p><p>Jack decides his next big project is to build a shrine to each of his man-crushes in Minecraft.</p><p>“Alright, let’s get going, kids! Who should we build first? We’ve got Keanu Reeves, we’ve got Tom Hardy, we’ve got… others. We’ve got Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson!” Jack claps. “Oh man, we’ve gotta do Dwayne. Fast and Furious? Jumanji? <em>Moana?</em> That guy has got the <em>range.</em>”</p><p>Jack spends the next half hour creating a frame for his naked portrait of Dwayne Johnson, in the next room over from his Minecraft Hugh Jackman. He talks about having sex with the Rock a <em>lot,</em> with a frequency that <em>must </em>imply that he’s trying to emit some kind of subliminal message. Who knows, maybe Jack wanted them <em>all</em> to fuck Dwayne Johnson.</p><p>He doesn’t seem to mind the chat going nuts about it, probably because it wasn’t <em>him</em> that had to moderate it. That was, much to Rhys’ chagrin, <em>Rhys’</em> job. The chat screeches about how Jack would <em>not</em> be the one doing the rawing in a Jack/Dwayne sex scenario. Rhys can’t help but agree, and eventually, people lost interest in the joke. He breathes a sigh of relief. Maybe if the chat stopped thinking about HandsomeJack’s sex habits, Rhys would be able to stop thinking about it too.</p><p>“So, boys,” Jack says, killing the zombies that have spawned in the corridor next to his shrines. “All we gotta do is find a texture pack image of naked Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and we’re golden, baby. We’re going to be the naked Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson <em>king.</em>”</p><p>He claps his hands together and laughs. “I’ll do that off-stream, kiddos. Can’t bore you with the details of where I get my top secret, nude, tastefully censored texture-packs. So!” He grins, saving his game and closing. “TwitchCon is coming up soon,” he says, switching off the view of his game and turning the screen into a large view of his face. “Who’s coming? Better be most of you. You better be coming, CompanyMan. I swear, Rhys, if you don’t show me this huge dildo collection I’ve been hearing about, I’m quitting streaming.”</p><p>Rhys blinks, pauses, hesitates. His face is on <em>fire.</em></p><p>“Is Rhys in the chat? Hello? He was here a second ago, wasn’t he?”</p><p>The chat is momentarily full of people saying: ‘Rhys?!’ and nothing else.</p><p>After what feels like a long pause, he prods his fingers against the keys one by one.</p><p>“We’ll see Jack,” he says as he types, and hits send after a moment of silence.</p><p>“Don’t play coy, CompanyMan,” Jack returns, immediately. “Come and tell me about your dildo collection.”</p><p>Rhys puts his face in his hands and rubs the cold metal of his prosthetic over his flushed skin.</p><p>“We’ll see, Jack.” He repeats, “Maybe I’m shy about my dildo collection. Maybe my dildo collection of HandsomeJack branded dildos is <em>private.</em>”</p><p>Jack roars with laughter and finishes up the stream.</p><p>Rhys keeps his head in his hands and tries not to think about his dreams.</p><p>Rhys puts his head in his hands and tries valiantly not to think about anything at all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>You can find me on tumblr at <a href="https://finnlogan.tumblr.com">finnlogan</a>  for my main blog, or at my fic blog <a href="https://verulamfic.tumblr.com">verulamfic</a>, where i am always taking fic requests. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! I’ve been thinking about this AU a lot, so I’d love to see what y’all think :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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